Gala Porras-Kim is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work questions how knowledge is acquired and how artworks and objects function as meaning-makers inside and outside of arts and cultural institutions. Her recent work has investigated the collecting practices of museums, questioning what is being collected and how it got there; her art imagines what might happen if those objects had a say in their possession and their future.

Her solo exhibition, A Hand in Nature, focuses on the natural world and lived environment, building upon questions she developed while researching historical collections. Many of the artworks on view distill natural processes into sculptures, drawings, and installations that slowly grow, evolve, or degrade over the course of the exhibition. From sculptures rendered with salt-saturated concrete or copal resin wetted with local rainwater to drawings created from slow drips of water and projections made from light refractions, Porras-Kim’s work imagines what might be possible if natural forces and phenomena were granted creative agency.

The exhibition also features works that recast our understanding of the history of human civilization, as well as research-oriented works that serve as case studies for the repatriation and return of artifacts to their primary locations and functions. These works highlight how the values and priorities of humans today may often run counter to those of peoples from the past, as well as to processes in nature. The projects shown here prompt visitors to reflect on and reorient our relationships with nature and other living beings both past and present, in the hope of moving towards a dynamic characterized by respect, dignity, and camaraderie.

Gala Porras-Kim was born in Bogotá, Colombia in 1984, of Colombian-Korean descent. She lives and works in Los Angeles and London. Porras-Kim is a finalist for the 2023 Korea Artist Prize.

Traveling Venues

Gala Porras-Kim: A Hand in Nature traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, January 24, 2025-June 1, 2025.

About the artist

Gala Porras-Kim’s (b. 1984, Bogotá; lives and works in Los Angeles and London) work is about how the social and political contexts that influence history have been framed through the fields of linguistics, history and conservation. The work considers the way institutions shape inherited codes and forms and conversely, how objects can shape the contexts in which they are placed. Porras-Kim has had solo exhibitions at the MCA, Denver; Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York; Museo delle Civilita, Rome in 2024; Leeum and MMCA Seoul; the Fowler Museum, Los Angeles; Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Sevilla; MUAC, Mexico City; in 2023; Gasworks, London, Amant Foundation, Brooklyn, and Kadist in 2022, and the MOCA, Los Angeles in 2019 among others. Her work has been included in the Liverpool Biennial (2023), and Gwangju and Sao Paulo Biennales (2021), Whitney Biennial and Ural Industrial Biennial (2019). She was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2019) and the artist-in-residence at the Getty Research Institute (2020−22).